The Pigskin Library comes to Harvard

The "Pigskin Library" was the collection of books that Theodore Roosevelt took with him, or had sent out to him, on his African safari, 1909-1910, for his personal reading. The name derived from the fact that most of the books were bound or rebound in pigskin. TR wrote: "They were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with me, either in my saddle-bag or in the cartridge- bag.... Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle bag looks."

The "library" was a gift to TR from his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and was carried in a light and shiny aluminum case. The books and the case were given by TR, on his return from Africa and Europe, to his daughter Ethel Roosevelt Derby, who left them to her daughter Sarah Alden Derby (Mrs. Robert T.) Gannett. When TR wrote of the Pigskin Library and published a list of the books, there was much public interest, in part because President C. W. Eliot of Harvard, with whom TR was frequently at odds, had just released his list of the (in Eliot's opinion) best books, and inevitably the two lists were compared. TR said no list could be definitive, and that his list merely showed the books he personally wanted to read at that point in his life.

TR's list of about 60 books included novels by Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper, Thackeray, and Dickens; the collected poetry of Poe, Browning, Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Shelley; Dante's Inferno and Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress; The Federalist Papers and the Bible with Apocrypha; Alice in Wonderland and short stories by Bret Harte; the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Lord Macaulay; as well as many others.

What is known today as the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard began as a collection assembled at Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace by what is now the Roosevelt Memorial Association, now called the Theodore Roosevelt Association. The books and manuscripts, mounted photographs, bound magazine articles, and other materials in time outgrew the space at TR Birthplace. The research collection was donated to Harvard, TR's alma mater, in 1943, and now consists of thousands of books and articles; over 10,000 photographs, over 5,000 cartoons, and many manuscripts, letters, and papers. Parts of the collection are housed in the Houghton, Widener, and Pusey libraries. The Pigskin Library is currently on display in the TR Gallery in the Pusey Library at Harvard.

To consider the Pigskin Library is not an exercise in trivial pursuit, or merely antiquarian or bibliographic interest. Rather it is to see some of the sources or streams that flowed into Theodore Roosevelt's mind, as well as to note some of the books that a well-educated and cultivated man of that era would read. Most of these title were old favorites of TR's. He liked to reread books. Those familiar with Roosevelt's writings and his speeches will recognize some sources listed in the Pigskin Library, such as Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, which is where TR found his famous man with the muck rake, the muckrakers. Some titles, such as the five books by George Borrow (Mrs. Roosevelt adored Borrow), will be completely unfamiliar even to a well-read person in the twenty-first century. All the titles reveal something about TR and about the intellectual history of his period.